Samurai and Other Stories (26 page)

And just like that everything came together... Duncan drinking my whisky, Wee Annie eating a curry, the two men wolfing down fish suppers. Somebody... or something, didn’t want any breaking of the diet.

Binding agreement.

That’s what Ellison had said. It looked like it had been more binding than any of them had anticipated.

I turned back into the room. “You have to take the drip out,” I said.

“I don’t
have
to do anything.”

We weren’t given time to get into an argument. The front window blew in with a crash and something that looked like a shaved albino chimpanzee bounded inside. I was halfway to the bed already, but I was too late. It latched its mouth on Ellison’s face and
sucked
.
 

The sound of Ellison’s life draining away made my guts roil. I stepped forward and punched at the hunched figure sat on the man’s chest. My hand seemed to sink into it. It felt like hitting a slab of warm butter.

The moist sucking stopped. The beast raised its mouth from the dry husk that had once been David Ellison. It turned towards me.

There was no face.

But it saw me, just the same.
 

A wet, oily mouth opened, no more than a slit in that formless visage. I aimed another punch, but met only air as the beast leapt out of the broken window. I had a last glimpse of white as it jumped through the shrubbery, then it was gone.
 

*
   
*
   
*

The nurse stood at the garden door, cigarette dangling from her fingers, mouth opening and closing like a drowning goldfish.

“I thought he was hallucinating,” she whispered. “A big white dug he said it was. I didnae believe him.”

I took the cigarette from her before she burned her fingers.

“His pal, Peter Clarke. Does he live round here?”

She couldn’t take her eyes from the dried out
thing
on the bed.

‘I thought he was addled,” she said softly. She was on the verge of going into shock, but I didn’t have time to play nice. I slapped her cheek until I got her attention. It took a while.

Finally her eyes fixed on mine.

“Clarke,” I said. “Does he live round here?”

“Acacia Avenue,” she said. “Two lefts then a right, number 45.”

I was on my way out of the door before she remembered to be outraged.

“Hey. You hit me. I’ve a good mind to...”

I didn’t hear any more. I ran along the suburban streets, hoping like hell I would make it on time.

*
   
*
   
*

45 Acacia Avenue wasn’t quite like the other houses on the street. The lawn hadn’t been mown for months, and fast food cartons lay strewn the length of the drive alongside torn rubbish bags spilling their contents to the wind.
 

But it was the front door that gave away the fact that I’d left suburbia behind. It was covered in intricate drawings done in black charcoal; swirls and curlicues around pentagrams and hexagrams. I’d seen something like it before, during research on another case that had taken a dive into the twilight zone. But this looked less like a formal magic protection ritual and more like a man trying as many symbols as he could, in the hope that at least one might work.

I knocked hard on the door.

Somebody moved inside, but they didn’t answer.

“Mr. Clarke? I know about the diet... and the
Binding Agreement.
I’m here to help.”
 

“Help? I’m afraid the time for that passed a while back.”

The door opened.

I expected to see another skeletal, shuffling figure, but this man was portly, almost fat. He was unshaven and smelled ripe, but otherwise seemed healthy.

“Peter Clarke?”

He hurried me inside and closed the door quickly. He led me through to a room piled knee deep in food cartons, beer cans and dirty clothing. It smelled worse than I did after a night on the town. The curtains had been pulled closed and the air felt stale and warm. There hadn’t been a window opened in here for a long time.

“It’s the maid’s day off,” he said, and spilled a waterfall of trash on the floor to make room for me to sit on an armchair. I let myself down gingerly, making sure I was going to be able to get back up before committing myself.
 

I lit up a smoke as soon as he sat opposite me. It helped some with the smell, but not quite enough.

We sat and looked at each other for a while.

“You’re looking well,” I said when he showed no signs of talking.

“In the circumstances, I suppose I can’t really complain. I could be dead, like the other three.”

“Other five,” I said softly.

He went pale.
 

“I’m the last?”

I nodded.

“Then it must be
huge
by now,” he said.

I didn’t have to ask him what he meant.

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “But I don’t know exactly what I was looking at. Care to fill me in?”

He lifted a six pack of beer and threw a can towards me. I was careful to give it a good wipe with the arm of my jacket before opening it. It was warm, but went down well enough.

“It was Duncan’s fault,” he began. “We were just a few days into the diet and we started talking about targets. Between the six of us we decided to lose around ten stone.

“‘That’s a full person’s worth,’
Duncan had said. And that’s what got me thinking that we should make ourselves a promise. So I had the contract written up, that we would go on until enough weight was lost to add up to a person. It was my idea that we sign it in blood, to seal the deal.”

He laughed bitterly.

“It was supposed to be a joke... just something to focus our attention. How was I to know that it wasn’t all bullshit?”

“Well, you know now,” I replied. I lit a second cigarette.

“I had an inkling when Annie died,” he said. “And then when the other two were taken at the office, I knew something was up. So I did some reading. Two nights later something scratched at my door after I’d had my supper, but I’d taken precautions and put up the protection. And it’s kept working.”

“You’ve been here ever since?”

He waved at the detritus around us.

“Welcome to my world.”

“And you knew how to stop this thing, but you let it take your friends anyway?”

He shrugged.

“I figured if it was pestering them, then it wasn’t pestering me. Beside, if they had any smarts of their own, they could have figured it out the same way I did.”

I was getting angry now, and had to push it down. “They died horrible, piteous deaths you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”

He shrugged again.

“Shit happens,” he said.

I had nothing more to say to this
thing.
The white beast had more humanity in it than he would ever have.

I stood and walked to the front door. He followed me and stood in the hallway.

“So you have no regrets for their deaths?”

“Survival of the fittest,” he said. “I win.”

He closed the door on me.

I turned to leave.

It stood there in the shadows beside the small porch... a white figure as tall as a man but unformed, featureless save for a gaping maw of a mouth. It swayed from side to side and keened in a high wailing like a child’s sob.
 

Survival of the fittest.

I turned back to the front door and wiped a smudge down the length of the protection spell. Then I walked away. I heard the door crash inwards as I reached the end of the driveway.
 

I might only have imagined that I heard the screams.
 

But I smiled anyway.

William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with twenty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work has appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he's not writing he dreams of fortune and glory.

Connect with William Meikle

Website:

www.williammeikle.com

Facebook:

www.facebook.com/williammeikle

Twitter:

twitter.com/williemeikle

Amazon:

www.amazon.com/author/williammeikle

Connect with Crystal Lake Publishing

Website (be sure to sign up for our newsletter):

www.crystallakepub.com

Facebook:

www.facebook.com/Crystallakepublishing

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/crystallakepub

We hope you enjoyed this title. If so, we would be grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, your blog or one of the many websites open to book reviews. Reviews are essential for a successful book. And remember to keep an eye out for more of our books. We have collections by Daniel I. Russell, Kevin Lucia and Gary McMahon, as well as novellas and anthologies.

THANK YOU FOR PURCHASING THIS BOOK

Copyright 2014 Crystal Lake Publishing

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9922182-2-5

Cover Design:
Ben Baldwin

eBook Formatting:
Robert Swartwood

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Publication History

Samurai in the Kindle ebook of the same name.

Rickman’s Plasma , Creature Feature, Ghostwriter Publications, 2009

Home is the Sailor , Holiday of the Dead, Wild Wolf Publishing, 2011

Turn Again , Null Immortalis, Nemonymous 2010

Inquisitor, Historical Lovecraft, Innsmouth Free Press, 2011

The Scotsman’s Fiddle, Mountain Magic, Woodland Press, 2010

The Toughest Mile, The Game, Seven Realms Press, 2011

The Havenhome, High Seas Cthulhu, Elder Signs Press, 2007

The Yule Log, This is horror ezine, Winter 2011

Living the Dream, Watch, Phoenix Imprint Press, 2011

The Shoogling Jenny, Specters in Coal Dust, Woodland Press, 2010

The Haunting of Esther Cox in the Kindle ebook of the same name.

Dancers in The Weekly News newspaper in June 2007.

The Brotherhood of the Thorns in the Kindle ebook of the same name.

The Young Lochinvar in The Mothman Files, Woodland Press, 2011

A Slim Chance in A Cat of Nine Tales, Rookhaven, 2012